Michael Larabel of Phoronix documents his recent benchmarks between early versions of FreeBSD 11.0, DragonFlyBSD, and various Linux distributions. See the link below for the full report — ranging from SQLite tests, PostMark, GraphicsMagick, to LAME MP3 encoding.

Following last week’s DragonFlyBSD 4.6 benchmarks I carried out a fresh comparison of FreeBSD 10.3 vs. FreeBSD 11.0 (Beta 4 at the time) along with the DragonFlyBSD results and a few of the popular Linux distributions. Here are those numbers.

Tested for this comparison were DragonFlyBSD 4.4.3, DragonFlyBSD 4.6.0, FreeBSD 10.3, FreeBSD 11.0-BETA4, Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS, Ubuntu 16.10 in its current development state, Intel Clear Linux, and CentOS Linux 7. The x86_64/amd64 version of each OS was tested on a clean install each time using the same system hardware and each OS left to its default settings/packages.

This tutorial from the FreeBSD Foundation will show you how to get FreeBSD set up on a Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi is known for its tiny size and affordable cost, for any computer enthusiast looking to test a project or install an operating system onto. See the link below for the full instructions.

Requirements:

Computer with an SD slot for burning the image. You will need root privileges on this device.

The developers of FreeBSD have made available the first release candidate of version 11.0. You can download the ISO or update files here. The full release notes are in the link below.

A summary of changes since BETA4 includes:
o A NULL pointer dereference in IPSEC has been fixed.
o Support for SSH Protocol 1 has been removed.
o OpenSSH DSA keys have been disabled by default. Users upgrading from
prior FreeBSD versions are urged to update their SSH keys to DSA or
ECDSA keys before upgrading to 11.0-RC1.
o PCI-e hotplug on bridges with power controllers has been disabled.
o A loader tunable (hw.pci.enable_pcie_hp) to disable PCI-e HotPlug has
been added.
o A VESA panic on suspend has been fixed.
o Google Compute Engine image publication has been fixed.
o An AES-ICM heap corruption typo bug has been fixed.
o A regression in pf.conf while parsing the 'interval' keyword has been
fixed.
o A ZFS/VFS deadlock has been fixed.
A list of changes since 10.0-RELEASE are available on the releng/11.0
release notes:
https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.0R/relnotes.html
Please note, the release notes page is not yet complete, and will be
updated on an ongoing basis as the 11.0-RELEASE cycle progresses.

The FreeBSD Core & Security teams have made a recent announcement concerning freebsd-update and portsnap vulnerabilities. See the full the message from the mailing list which should address any concerns among the community.

Dear FreeBSD Community:
The FreeBSD Core team and FreeBSD Security team would like to update the community on the reports of security vulnerabilities in freebsd-update, portsnap, libarchive, and bspatch.
We understand the severity of this issue, and are actively working to resolve the issues and improve the security of FreeBSD.
A recent post[1] to the freebsd-security@ list raised a number of questions[2] and we would like to address those.
1. Since there are known vulnerabilities in freebsd-update and portsnap, why has there been no notification to the community from secteam@?
As a general rule, the FreeBSD Security Officer does not announce vulnerabilities for which there is no released patch. We are reviewing this policy for cases where a proof-of-concept or working exploit is already public.
2. Why was there no mention of the fact that running freebsd-update to install the fix for the bspatch advisory [SA-16:25] may actually expose users to the vulnerability?
To be exposed, a user would need to be under an active Man-In-The-Middle attack when fetching patches. The Security Advisory did not contain information on the theoretical implications of the vulnerability. A more explicit paragraph in the 'Impact' statement may have been warranted. As always, instructions on how to compile the patched bspatch manually rather than using freebsd-update were provided as part of the advisory.
3. The patch included in SA-16:25 is incomplete, and may still permit heap corruption. The patch included in the document dump is more complete. Why only a partial fix?

The developers of FreeBSD have made available the FOURTH BETA for version 11.0. Additional changes as noted by Phoronix are improvements to NUMA, networking, ARM support, Bhyve virtualization, and LLVM Clang 3.8 as default compiler. Download the ISO/update file here.

A summary of changes since 11.0-BETA3 includes:
o The mtx_trylock_spin(9) kernel synchronization primitive was added.
o The machdep.disable_msix_migration loader tunable has been re-enabled
for EC2 AMIs.
o The iwm(4) and iwmfw(4) drivers have been updated.
o The new system hardening options have been fixed to avoid overwriting
other options selected during install time.
o Several build-related fixes.
o Several miscellaneous bug fixes.
A list of changes since 10.0-RELEASE are available on the stable/11
release notes:
https://www.freebsd.org/relnotes/11-STABLE/relnotes/article.html

This tutorial by userNguyenViet Duy shows us how to setup a new installation of FreeBSD 10.3. Duy shows you step by step with graphics on what to do, making it very easy for beginners. See the link below for the full instructions.

User John Ramsden shows us how to get OpenVPN set up on FreeBSD 10.3. OpenVPN is an open source implementation of a virtual private network utilizing TLS/SSL connections. See the link below for the full instructions

While trying to setup OpenVPN, I noticed there was no up-to-date information with correct instructions. OpenVPN uses EasyRSA to setup keys, it has recently been changed in version 3. As a result of this, the old steps to configure OpenVPN are no longer correct. I went through the process of setting up a VPN using OpenVPN on FreeBSD 10.3.

This is the up to date way to configure OpenVPN on FreeBSD.

Setup

A few things are required before OpenVPN can be setup.

Install Needed Software

To start with, install the required software. The only thing necessary to install should be OpenVPN. Easy-RSA is brought along in the install.

After updating the package repository, install openvpn. I’m using pkg, if you are using ports you should know the analagous process.

This article by Hamza Sheikh details his journey of moving from Linux to FreeBSD. He discusses everything from the ports offered, BSD licensing, choosing from the various BSD distributions, to ZFS. See the link below for the full story.

Before going into why FreeBSD is now my preferred OS for learning UNIX, let us review why I used Linux for a long time.

I started with Red Hat (before RHEL) in the early 2000s; tried to install it on a variety of hardware from CDs found in the back pages of books from the library. There was not a single working install so I gave up. Then came the Ubuntu hype, and around 2006 I built a computer specifically to install and learn it. Everything – except Wi-Fi – worked out of the box. I managed to get Wi-Fi working with ndiswrapper reading a lot of community documentation. I now had a working box and I began my Linux journey.